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Life went on in Kesennuma, a small port city located about 400 km northeast of Tokyo, as if nothing terrible ever happened. The old lady running a small sushi restaurant continued to offer her guests a convivial smile and politeness typical of the Japanese. A local salt producer, whose business relies on the traditional method of depositing and evaporating sea water in a stove to produce salt, joked about how sympathetic people sent him stacks of bamboo trees without knowing that they would explode in a stove. May be two years was enough time for the Kesennuma community to recover from the blow. Its members look content, if not outright cheerful.

On March 11th, 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 9.03 occurred near the coast of Japan and gave rise to a tsunami that soared as high as 40.5m and traveled as far as 10km inland. Last September, Japan’s National Police Agency confirmed that a total of 15,883 died, 6,143 were injured, and 2,681 went missing as a result of the disaster. It also destroyed or nearly destroyed 1,075,195 buildings. The earthquake is recorded as the most destructive natural disaster ever to occur in Japan and the fifth most powerful earthquake humanity has ever witnessed.

Numbers surprisingly don’t convey much, and I couldn’t comprehend the enormity of what had happened until I hiked up the city’s highest point for an overview of post-tsunami Kesennuma. There, I saw a vast emptiness in the place of a lively downtown with a rusty ship at the center. The Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 as it is known affected Kesennuma in the form of a tsunami that towered 10m high. It engulfed the port in an instant and swept everything in its path before coming to rest near the heart of the city. Half an hour was all it took to obliterate one half of the city. As if a hulking surge was not enough of an ordeal, the city was soon ablaze with wildfire that swallowed what little normalcy that remained in Kesennuma. Commercial fishing had been the city’s main industry for generations, and Kesennuma’s port had always been populated with boats of various size and shape. The raging tsunami carried and ripped them apart, causing a massive oil leak that took no time to spread to all corners of the city. Perhaps a factory exploded or an evacuating family left its gas valve unattended, but as soon as the leaking oil found its way into a source of fire, the entire city flared up and burned for four days. When the fire finally died down and the survivors could look around without suffocating from the smoke, all they could see was nothingness that stretched across a former bustling center of activity and a 330-ton ship at the center of it. The tsunami had carried this ship miles inland and left it behind when the surge returned to normal. Two years have passed, but the memories the ship evokes are still so painful that the city decided to remove it permanently just last month.

Yet the survivors have to deal with much more than just painful memories and psychological scars. The tsunami destroyed most means that the community relied on to support itself. Kesennuma’s chief industry had been processing bonito and swordfish. In fact, commercial fishing and associated industries accounted for 85% of local jobs. A significant portion of those jobs evaporated when entire fleets of fishing boats were reduced to mere scraps of junk. Some survivors were lucky enough to have resources to resume business as usual. But soon rumors spread that Kesennuma’s fish products were affected by radioactivity as the nearby Fukushima nuclear reactors were also damaged by the earthquake, and any hopes of the city’s fishing industry regaining its past stature were instantly killed. Non-fishing business suffered as well, because there were no functioning buildings left to accommodate them. Even now, most local businesses are housed in temporary plastic buildings, the kind you normally see at construction sites. The main customers of this struggling economy are volunteer workers who have come to aid in Kesennuma’s reconstruction. The most attractive tourist spots in the area are all tsunami-related: a tree bent by the tsunami whose resultant shape looks like that of a dragon; a high school behind a post-tsunami waste incinerator whose broken windows on the fourth floor are proof to how high the wave soared; and the Plaza Hotel’s salty hot spring that provides guests with a breathtaking view of a city now wiped off the map.

Two years was too short a time for the Kesennumans to move on and casually say that shit happened; the wounds were too fresh and too deep. Then how could they smile? How could they? How and why do they adopt a deceiving facade of a happy, well-functioning community? It took me a while to fully understand the apparent nonchalance and the more subtle happiness that now defines the face of Kesennuma. But then, it all made sense. What choice do they have in the wake of such a tragedy than to constantly reassure themselves, however unconvincingly, that all is well and life would get better? What else can they do if not find comfort in the very warmth they share among themselves and with strangers? They weren’t pretending, they were living their lives the only way they could live. It was heart wrenching even for me to walk past a graveyard where a seven-year-old girl was buried together with her grandparents, on top of whose tombs were placed several bottles of Calpis, a children’s popular beverage that apparently had been the girl’s favorite. I can only imagine what a living hell the past two years must have been to most residents here. And yet, Kesennuma is still a place where an old sushi chef is happy to converse with a Korean one-third his age through clumsy hand gestures and give handmade postcards with a nostalgic image of Kesennuma he himself drew, as a token of gratitude for visiting and listening to his story.

The humanity here is overwhelming. Thank you Kesennuma, and I wish you well.